HARD TARGET

HOLLOWPOINT

“Hard Target” — Page Five

I’ve changed the Update schedule back to “Temporarily Sporadic” until we get a handle on things. (Patrons won’t be charged during this period.)

We finally get to see Letoa going through training at Quantico. With “going through” being the operative phrase. There are some trainees that are hard to forget, and she’s definitely going to be one of them.

Whew! Full couple of weeks. They weren’t bad weeks, just busy ones. Wish Max and I could show you what we’ve been working on, but it’s not our property. If it finally gets to the point of public disclosure, we’ll let you know. Glad to be back though!

More below!

Bobservations

Home On The Range

If you live in the USA and you are an adult, you’ve probably been shooting at least once in your life. There are gun ranges scattered all over the place, and no matter how you may personally feel about firearms, it seems like there will eventually come a time when a group of friends or work buddies will decide to go punch some paper, and off you go. I doubt the experience has ever changed anyone’s mindset, but at least you can say you’ve tried it once. Even Max-The-Artist has apparently been shooting recently, under just those circumstances. Hopefully he saved the receipt, because as of this page he can now write it off his taxes as “research.”

During my days writing hard-boiled detective stories I went to the gun range a number of times, mainly because they would let you rent all sorts of firearms to try. It allowed me to write about them with reasonable accuracy at minimal expense. It was useful. And yes, I’ve been yelled at by the range supervisor for firing too quickly. It is always a temptation with a semi-auto to see how fast you can empty a magazine. You also discover that doing such a thing with a gun that has actual recoil makes control pretty difficult, which is why they don’t allow it. You can tell how often it happens by visiting a gun range and looking up. See all those lines of bullet holes stitched into the acoustical tile of the ceiling? That’s what happens when people try to shoot really fast with a gun that kicks upward.

Unless, of course, they have nerves of steel and iron-clad control. Like, y’know, Letoa.

One great memory of my early-1980s gun-range days is those times when a tourist bus would pull up. The gun ranges were hugely popular with Japanese tourists and a bus full of excited Asians would pull up and disgorge a neat and orderly crowd of dark-haired males (well, mostly males.) They would line up at the counter and while they generally couldn’t speak much English, it seemed like every one of them knew two important words from that era.

“Dirty Harry.”

The gun range owner, who probably made a good living just from these tourists, would beam, reach under the counter, and bring up a special wooden gun rack containing ten identical Smith & Wesson Model 29s. As each Japanese tourist would step up to the counter, the owner would smile, hand him a tray of bullets, and rather ceremoniously lay a gleaming length of blued steel with an 8-3/8″ barrel across the top.

Somebody was killed at a local gun range when he thought it would be funny to hand a Smith & Wesson 29 to an inexperienced shooter in his church group. She had the gun in a death grip, and fired three shots. The recoil from the first two shots sent the gun over her shoulder, still gripped tightly in both hands. The man was standing behind her, and the third shot tore through his neck.

I doubt very much he was handing out actual magnums.
He probably chromed pistols of MUCH smaller caliper (.22 comes to mind) and handed them out to tourists who wouldn’t know.
After all, most japanese born after haven’t seen an actual firearm (it’s illegal)

Nah just give them .44 Special rounds. They chamber and fire through the magnum revolver without excessive recoil. An artifact of the development of the .44 Magnum as it is just a .44 SPC with a slightly longer case to safely hold more powder. To keep people like Elmer Keith from blowing up too many guns with his hand loads .

Somebody was killed at a local gun range when he thought it would be funny to hand a Smith & Wesson 29 to an inexperienced shooter

The TVtropes article on Law of Inverse Recoil – about how we have wrong ideas about which firearms have the most recoil – has two stories like this in the ‘Real life’ section. Sadly, it was about children which were handed mini- or micro-uzis at a firing range. When they lost control of the full-auto recoil, one killed himself, the other shoot her instructor.

Until you learn to use it, a gun is not a toy.
I have fond memories of learning to use an assault rifle during my (short) army time. It was also the only occasion I saw a captain hit a simple soldier (not me). The poor sod forgot to keep his FAMAS pointed down-range and the firearm instructor was quick to remind him with a good whack of a rifle cleaning rod.
Never point a gun toward something you don’t want to destroy and all that.

Uh, for some reason I’m not too afraid for Letoa going rapid-fire. She seems on her way to outrun her instructors. OTOH, I may be slightly afraid of her…

the difference between a rule and a law.
break a law (like a law of physics) and you pay (sometimes badly) immediately.
to every rule, there is an exception.
the exception makes it a rule (and not a law)

Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 9mm. Great, reliable, accurate, easily concealable pistol at a very reasonable price. Of course if cost is no consideration for you, Sig Sauer make extremely high quality pistols. However, if money is no consideration for you, would you mind buying me a few pistols off of my wish list?